Kathy Piede used to walk the Naples Pier every week. When the city started tearing it down this year, a reporter from WINK News caught her nearby and asked how she felt about it. She said she was fine bringing her own snacks now that the concession stand was gone, though she figured tourists might miss it. That small, practical complaint says more about how Naples actually uses its pier than any of the renderings the city council has approved. It's not really about the view. It's about the routine.
That routine got interrupted in January 2026, when crews broke ground on the pier's full rebuild after Hurricane Ian gutted the structure back in September 2022. The storm tore out roughly 460 feet of decking, dropped about 140 feet of it straight into the Gulf, and left the rest structurally compromised enough that the city's engineers decided the whole thing had to come down rather than get patched again. If you've lived in Old Naples through the past four years, you already knew that part. What's less obvious is what's happened to the sunset ritual itself while the fence has been up, and what's actually different about the pier you'll be walking on once it reopens.
The construction is not background noise anymore
For most of 2024 and 2025, the pier rebuild was a permitting story: FEMA applications, design revisions, a contract award to Shoreline Foundation Inc. for the demolition and construction work. That changed this spring and summer, when the project moved from paperwork into visible progress. In late April, crews deployed 59 concrete pilings to Wasmer Reef, expanding an artificial reef that the city first established there in 2015, essentially recycling the old pier's material into new fish habitat offshore. By early May, divers had started a month-long cleanup to pull buried pilings from the 1990s off the seafloor so the new supports could go in safely.
Mid-June brought the trestle, a temporary bridge-like walkway on the pier's south side that lets crews keep working even when rough weather forces the offshore barges to pull back. By June 26, the crew completed its first concrete pour for the bents, the vertical piling clusters capped by a crossbeam that will carry the new deck, pouring about 20 yards of concrete into rebar and plywood molds. A second pour followed on July 9. That's the pace right now: not a demolition site sitting idle, but a structure going back up piece by piece through the middle of the season when Naples would normally have the fewest tourists and the most locals walking that stretch of beach.
The total project runs about $26.3 million, with roughly $12.66 million of that coming from federal sources, including an $11.4 million FEMA grant, alongside state grants, $11 million in bonds, $2 million in county tourist development taxes, and public donations through groups like the Collier Community Foundation. Shoreline Foundation's own contract for the demolition and rebuild is $23.45 million. Multiple estimates put the full 18-month construction window landing somewhere between the middle and the end of 2027, which means this isn't a project locals should expect to see wrapped up before next season, or the one after.
Where the sunset actually goes when the pier doesn't have one
The pier's closure took away more than a landmark. It took away the default. For years, the answer to "where should we watch the sunset tonight" in Old Naples was just the pier, full stop. With 12th Avenue South closed west of Gulf Shore Boulevard for the duration of construction, that default doesn't exist right now, and the foot traffic that used to concentrate in one place has scattered across a handful of specific spots instead.
- Broad Avenue South and 13th Avenue South. The city built pedestrian bypasses at both beach ends specifically to keep beach access open during construction, and both include restrooms. These are the closest thing to a straight substitute for the pier itself, since they sit right next to the closed site.
- 8th Avenue South, known locally as Wedding Beach or Wedding Park. It was redesigned years ago with brick pavers, seating, and landscaping built for events, and it's become one of the busier stand-ins now that the pier is off limits.
- 14th Avenue South. No restrooms, no concession, nothing built for a crowd. That's the appeal. It's the access point locals mention when they want the tranquil version of a Naples sunset instead of the version with a line for the railing.
- Lowdermilk Park, about a mile north on Gulf Shore Boulevard North. It comes with a full set of amenities, a playground, volleyball courts, and enough space that it absorbs families who used to treat the pier as their default stop.
None of these are secret. What's changed is the balance. Before Ian, the pier pulled over a million visitors a year almost by gravity. Now that gravity has nowhere to land, and the result is that Naples residents have quietly built a rotating sunset circuit out of access points that used to be secondary options.
The pier that comes back won't be the pier that left
Here's the part that matters more than the construction timeline. Even once the rebuild finishes, the daily experience of the pier is going to be different in one specific way: there won't be a permanent concession stand anymore. FEMA guidelines prohibit permanent structures like the old Cosmos at the Pier restaurant from being built back over water, so the city council voted in March 2026 to replace it with a portable cart instead, something that can sell water, ice cream, and soda without adding a fixed structure at the end of the pier. Council member John Krol asked whether a mobile food truck could work instead, but the city manager said there wasn't room, so a cart is what's coming.
The new design also adds a beach patrol office with its own restroom on the north side, air-conditioned ADA-compliant restrooms, and an underwater camera meant to let visitors watch marine life from land. The pier will keep its familiar length, just over 1,000 feet, so the long walk out over the water stays intact. What goes away is the automatic stop for a snack on the way back in. If you've built your version of the sunset walk around grabbing something at the pier afterward, that habit is going to need a new answer once the pier reopens too, not just while it's under construction.
There's one more detail that says something about how the city is handling this. Many of the pier's benches were damaged by Ian, and the ones that survived have been removed and are being stored, not discarded. Residents and plaque owners can contact the city's Community Services department to arrange picking theirs up. The plaques themselves, mounted on the wall of one of the pier's facility buildings, aren't going anywhere and won't be relocated once construction wraps. It's a small thing, but it tells you the city is treating this less like a demolition and more like a preservation project that happens to require tearing the whole structure down first.
What this means for the rest of the season
If you live in Old Naples, the honest answer to "when do I get my pier back" is not this year, and probably not next year either. What you have in the meantime is a stretch of beach that's redistributed itself across Broad Avenue South, 13th Avenue South, 8th Avenue South, 14th Avenue South, and Lowdermilk Park, each with its own version of the same sunset. And when the new structure does open, sometime in the back half of 2027 if the current pace holds, it'll come back missing the one thing that made stopping there feel like a routine instead of just a view: somewhere to buy an ice cream on the way home.
For anyone tracking the rebuild itself, the city posts dated construction updates on its Naples Pier Rebuild Project page, which is worth a bookmark if you want to watch the next concrete pour happen in something closer to real time.
If you're already living the Naples sunset routine and thinking ahead to what's next for your own place on this coast, Heather Porrett knows this stretch of Old Naples block by block, from the beach access points to the canal systems further inland. You can browse more of what the area has to offer on the Naples neighborhood page, or reach out directly when you're ready to talk through what's changing here.
